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Stravinsky’s Lunch, by Drusilla Modjeska

When I recently read Bryan Appleyard’s Bedford Park – reviewed here – and came across Ford Maddox Hueffer, or Ford Maddox Ford as he is known, as a character in the book, I realised that although I haven’t read any of his books, I was already prejudiced against him. This is because of the way he treated his lover, the Australian artist Stella Bowen. He wasn’t physically cruel to her, but he was unfaithful, and even worse, he strangled her as an artist while she was with him. Stravinsky’s Lunch (1999) recounts their ten years together as part of a biography of Bowen. It also looks at the life of Grace Cossington Smith, another Australian artist whose work went unrecognised for years. I know it’s crazy to dislike a writer because of his or her life; it’s the quality of their work that matters. And I have set myself the task of reading at least one of Ford’s books about the First World War. But first, here’s the reason for the prejudice he’s going to have to overcome.

Stravinsky’s Lunch is more than a biography of two Australian painters. It takes its name from a story about Stravinsky: that when he was composing, he demanded that his wife and children remain completely silent during meals, on the grounds that they might interrupt his train of thought. Modjeska uses this idea to consider whether women’s art may be compromised by their love. Male composers, writers and artists often demand and usually receive the service of the women in their lives, to the detriment of the women’s own creative aspirations. It rarely works the other way round. Modjeska examines the lives and art of women painters in the 1920s and 1930s in Europe and Australia, concentrating on Stella Bowen, with a section on Grace Cossington Smith, and reference to a range of other women who sought to make a name as painters, contrasting them with some of the men doing the same. The book can thus be seen as something of a history of modernist painting during these years.

Born in Adelaide in 1893, Stella Bowen did what most creative people did at that time – left provincial, conservative Australia for Europe as soon as possible. She went in 1914 to study art in London. In 1918 she met and fell in love Ford Maddox Hueffer, already a well-known – though not well remunerated – writer, poet and critic. There was already a legal Mrs Hueffer, and another woman who called herself Mrs Hueffer, so Hueffer changed his name to Ford Maddox Ford, and though they never married, Stella was often referred to as Mrs Ford. (The name change may also have been because Hueffer sounded too German, though he had carried it through his days of active service in World War I.) To Stella, twenty years his junior, life with Ford seemed to open up a world of creative achievement. ‘Of course you shall be a painter and see the great world,’ he wrote to her. After their relationship was over ten years later, she generously wrote that what she got out of it – besides her daughter Julie – was ‘a remarkable and liberal education, administered in ideal circumstances.’ But for those years, although she did paint a little, including some portraits of Ford, her time was essentially absorbed in looking after his many needs. He believed in ‘the Divine Right of the Artist’, and expected to be treated as a genius. As Bowen wrote later, ‘a man writer or painter always manages to get some woman to look after him and make his life easy, and since female devotion … is a glut on the market, this is not difficult. A professional woman, however, seldom gets this cushioning unless she can pay for it.’ After she left him, she devoted her life to her work – and her much loved daughter – but had a hard time of it during the depression of the 1930s. She was appointed an official war artist during World War II and produced a memorable body of work. But like other female painters, she was often ignored in the mainstream histories of Australian art. I can’t blame Ford Maddox Ford for all this – but I blame him for some of it.

The story Modjeska tells of Grace Cossington Smith is very different. Born the year before Bowen, in Sydney, she only ever left Australia for a two year visit to England and Europe. She never married, and domestic duties fell to her sister. She worked in a studio on the edges of Sydney, aloof from the artists and writers of the inner city, painting ‘what she saw’ ‘from the thing itself’, though clearly in a modernist idiom. Largely ignored, she was ‘discovered’ in old age and her work is now widely admired. Though Modjeska says she isn’t making a comparison with the life of Stella Bowen, she makes it clear that a life committed to the vocation of art wasn’t easy for either of them, whether or not there was a man involved. But I don’t really see where Stravinsky’s lunch comes into Cossington Smith’s story.

I’m not being entirely accurate in calling this book a biography, or even a history. Written in the first person, it is rather Modjeska’s own search for understanding of the lives of these two painters. Bowen at least left a memoir, Drawn From Life (1941) that gives insights into her thoughts and feelings, though Modjeska concludes that it hides nearly as much as it reveals. In Cossington Smith’s case, there are just a few letters and interviews, leaving Modjeska guessing about many aspects of her life and work. Cossington Smith said late in life that she knew little of the work of other painters. But it seems incredible that she did not visit galleries in England and Europe when she was there, and even if there were limited occasions in Australia to look at the work of the great modernists, that she did not take up the opportunities that did arise. But we’ll never know. What Modjeska has, on the other hand, are the paintings of both women, many of which are reproduced in colour in the book and are a joy to see. She is a thoughtful observer who is knowledgeable about modernism and sees much that illuminates the paintings for the reader. Though sometimes she gets a bit self-involved with her questioning, I feel that there’s far more to the book than I’ve suggested in this short review. It is certainly worth reading.

Modjeska has mostly published in the area of memoir – albeit fictionalised – and non-fiction. Her first novel, The Mountain, came out in 2012 I’ve started reading it a couple of times, but never finished it. Maybe I should add it to the list after Ford Maddox Ford. You can read more about Modjeska’s life and work here.